


The Gentleman Stranger

by Laylah



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Lovecraft Pastiche, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 23:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3669108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't believe I've had the pleasure, sir," you say, extending your hand.</p>
<p>He smiles, his teeth like an anglerfish's. He takes your hand in one of his (if only he weren't gloved; you're so curious about the texture of his skin) and presses the other to his chest, where his heart ought to be. "Rrh'dan," he says, and then something you assume is a question, from the upward crook of the scale-ridge above his eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gentleman Stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dojo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dojo/gifts).



The waters are rising.

It's not the first time, of course. You recognize the signs from the scribbled records of observers who came before you, their fragmented notes that grasp clumsily for words to explain their dreams. Your mother's own observations fill a journal, the handwriting neat and precise in the early pages and a wavering scrawl by the last; even when she was at her worst, she recorded tides, moon phases, and omens in detail.

You remember her always with a drink in her hand, with eyes that looked past you, past the walls of your home, into some indistinct distance you couldn't reach. When you were old enough to pick the lock on the observatory and find the false bottom in her desk drawer, you read the journal for the first time. After that you understood a little more of why she drank, and where she looked.

Now it's your turn. The waters are rising.

* * *

Arkham is a town well accustomed to strange things. After all, the old timers say when a newcomer mentions it, there's both an asylum and a university. Can't expect things to stay calm all the time in a place like that, can you?

You've loved it unironically since the first day of your first semester. All the town's oddnesses feel right to you, from the charmingly quirky (those three blocks of Main Street that must remain cobblestoned, under the terms of a nineteenth-century ordinance that the council has never repealed) to the downright unsettling (the asylum's forbidding annex, where the windows are all boarded but sometimes smoke rises from the chimney, even though the local hooligans won't go near enough to tag it, much less squat there).

But this autumn it feels different. The rains leave behind a smell of brine and an oily film on the sidewalks. The ivy covering the campus library sags and stretches, until its leaves resemble the fronds of kelp. A lady—one presumes—has been seen walking slowly up and down the streets of the old town at night, and where she passes streetlamps the shadows rise and writhe alarmingly.

You do your best to get on with your studies nonetheless. One cannot hope to master the broodfester tongues if one is distracted by every little eldritch happening. As yet you can't even voice some of the glottals required for the language; that your professors can't either, and explain that human vocal cords are simply incapable, is little comfort. You want to know what these sigils are meant to sound like. You want to know so many things.

* * *

The visitations become personal one drizzly afternoon when you're leaving C.D. Ward's Tomes and Antiquities and bump into someone hurrying up the street.

He recoils slightly, making a sound you doubt you could replicate. You look up from your purchase and examine him: most of his figure is obscured by a thick black greatcoat and a gray striped scarf, but his face alone is fascinating. His skin is unnervingly white with a grayish cast, and what little you can see of his sclerae are egg-yolk yellow, framing deep violet irises. His nose seems an afterthought in a way you'd have trouble describing more concretely than that.

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure, sir," you say, extending your hand.

He smiles, his teeth like an anglerfish's. He takes your hand in one of his (if only he weren't gloved; you're so curious about the texture of his skin) and presses the other to his chest, where his heart ought to be. "Rrh'dan," he says, and then something you assume is a question, from the upward crook of the scale-ridge above his eye.

You nod graciously. "I'm Rose."

"Rrrrhhsse," he repeats, entirely unvoiced and aspirated. He bows over your hand, hissing another long string of sibilants as he straightens up.

You smile back, though you don't show him your teeth at all. "You flatter me."

He asks another question. It's maddening that you don't know the language.

"I'm so sorry," you say. "I would like nothing better than to stay and chat, but my time isn't my own today. I have a paper due at midnight and a good number of citations left to make." You think his expression is disappointed. "Perhaps we'll see each other again, if you're staying in town for a while."

There's no doubt whatsoever that his response is an enthusiastic assent.

* * *

You go about your business. Your paper gets turned in, graded, returned. The professor's comments have an almost pleading tone to them, in the margins of your most sincere argument: not _telling_ you that you're wrong, but desperately _hoping_ that you are. You receive full marks.

A kitten shows up on your doorstep, pure black with four fish-white eyes. You hold the door open for it: that's the only decent thing to do for a cat that wants your home. The kitten makes itself comfortable, sleeping in the center of your bed, sitting on stacks of your notes, invading your space with the blithe casualness of a creature to whom human needs are irrelevant. When you look past it, and let yourself be aware of it only in your peripheral vision, sometimes its fur resolves into opalescent scales.

* * *

You encounter Rrh'dan for a second time in a cozy tea-house in Arkham's old town. You're curled up in a plush overchair near the fireplace, writing—indulging yourself in some frivolous fiction, while you have a few spare hours to devote to it—when you hear the hissing whisper that raises your hackles in a thrilling, primitive fear response. You look up to find your gentleman stranger apparently in conversation with the proprietor, who is remarkably able to hold her own.

A gentleman seated in the next chair harrumphs, shaking his head. "You can take the lady out of Innsmouth, but you just can't take Innsmouth out of the lady."

You give him the most withering glare in your arsenal. Small-minded prejudice seems even less sensible here than in most of the world. When Rrh'dan comes over and asks if the seat on your other side is taken—the phrasing, if you're parsing it right, is requesting permission to hold back the void from this position—the stuffy gentleman has some terribly manly equivalent of the vapors and has to leave.

Neither of you is capable of pronouncing the other's language passably, and you're not at all certain that your understanding is as good as you'd like it to be. All the same, you spend a pleasant half-hour in careful conversation that you think bodes quite well for the future.

* * *

Your mother calls one Saturday, asking how you are in that bright, bland way she does when she wants to pretend you're a normal family.

"I've met someone," you say when she tries to steer the conversation toward your lamentably pedestrian social life. "He's—"

"He!" your mother exclaims. "I was so sure you were a lesbian!"

"Is that so," you say flatly. 

"Tell me about him," she says.

"He's an architect," you say, which might be true for all you know. "And we're eloping. Right this minute, I'm afraid. I have to go."

She laughs, and tells you she loves you, and insists that you call her from Tahiti or wherever it is people go for exciting honeymoons these days. You claw your way out of the conversation and flop down on your bed, glaring at the almost-legible series of cracks in the ceiling.

"God, she'll probably make me an ironic wedding registry now," you realize. You won't even get to compile the atrociously inappropriate list yourself.

"Mrrrrt," says your dimensional-fugitive kitten. You can't argue.

* * *

The third time you encounter him, Rrh'dan presents you with a gift: a necklace of some fine pearlescent chain, hung with a pendant that resembles an octopus, from one angle, a skate's egg-case from another, and the sigil for _the chaos from which all creation springs_ when the light strikes it just right. You are flattered, and you tell him so. You try to manage the words in his own tongue, and he throws back his head in delight, air whistling through his gills in an analogue for laughter.

You wear the necklace. Your translations seem to come more easily. There is a sense to the language, a poetry of depth and distance and breathtaking, abyssal cold.

The fourth time you meet, you have a gift for him in return. It is perhaps less impressive than eldritch jewelry, but maybe if you're lucky he'll be as fascinated with your species' creations as you are with his. You've knitted him a cowl, to replace that drab scarf of his: it twists in a moebius, striped in deep violet to match his eyes and a pale lavender you're fond of yourself.

He loves it. When you give it to him his entire face comes alive, and he strips off the scarf right there. Then he hands the cowl back to you with a hopeful little smile. You put it on him gladly, and if your hands linger against his skin more than necessary, or if your fingertips brush the shivery cool edge of a gill, he doesn't seem to mind. 

He looks good in your colors.

* * *

There is a flood down in the harbor district, sludgy dark water that clings to wheels and boots and lampposts with sticky tenacity. In its aftermath a sailor is found dead on one of the piers, apparently drowned. People shake their heads and talk about the tragedy, but he was a stranger and nobody mourns for long.

New missing-person posters go up after the flood, too, but nobody talks about those at all.

* * *

Despite what you said to your mother, the fifth time you see Rrh'dan is the first time you think of it as a date. You go out to dinner, cracking open shellfish by candlelight to devour the slick, tender morsels inside. He's capable of crushing the shells bare-handed, and the sharp fragments do his palms no harm. You want those hands on your skin so badly.

But despite what your professors and classmates think, you do still know how to be cautious, and this is only a first date. After dinner you go walking on the foggy waterfront, arm in arm, listening to the secrets the water hisses as it laps at slowly rotting wood. Rrh'dan pays you compliments, comparing you with things that _have_ no translation that you're aware of—the hungry passion of his speech makes you think of Galadriel's vision of power, _beautiful and terrible as the dawn_. When you tell him in return that you wish you could cut him open and draw out all of his secrets, he smiles as if he could think of no sweeter endearment.

When he walks you home, you're the one who initiates the kiss goodnight, lips pressed carefully to the cool seam of his mouth. He is yours, this fascinating alien creature.

He has another gift for you: a darkly gleaming stoppered bottle, carved with a sigil that can mean either _dream_ or _freedom_ in the texts you've read so far. He presses it into your hands, beseeches you to take it. You agree. He kisses you again and tells you desperately sincere, impassioned things that you still catch more sound than sense of. You tell him goodnight before you can lose your resolve and bring him inside.

But that leaves you alone with a bottle of something dark and strange that smells indescribably luscious when you pry loose the cork. You've gone from Galadriel to Alice, pondering a bottle that is for all intents and purposes labeled Drink Me. Nothing good ever comes of that. Your own mother is a perfect example. And yet.

Rrh'dan knows you. He understands what you want, perhaps better than any human you've ever known. You should assume that his intentions are as selfish as yours, and perhaps that should give you pause.

_Drink Me_.

You uncork the bottle and pour some of its contents into a martini glass (your mother's idea of a charming gift for your first semester at college). The liquid, implausibly, is the same color as the glass, equal parts slate and shimmer. You don't have a word for the way it smells; there's nothing in your experience that compares. This can't possibly be safe.

In a nod to reason, even if you aren't quite on speaking terms tonight, you take the bottle and glass to your bedroom. You hunt down a towel, which the kitten promptly curls up on, and the bathroom wastebasket, which you set down beside your bed. If you're uncoordinated under the influence, you'll already be safely in a soft place to wait it out; if you're sick, you already have a vessel ready to contain the mess.

Rrh'dan's liquor tastes like the space between the stars, like the echoes that vibrate through benthic caverns, like the non-color of the glass that held it. Your throat feels cold, then warm, and then your whole body seems to turn to tingling light. You finish the glass and then, ever so gently, you swoon.

* * *

The universe unfolds, glistening, soft and wet as oysterflesh. Your appendages sink into its welcome, latching on, peeling back membranes and extending cilia beneath. You taste life, from its sweet beginning to its bitter ending and the return to sweetness in putrefaction afterward. You taste non-life, the rhythms greater and older than those of bodies. Time has a texture, space a melody, and there is a third axis you cannot name that is full of light.

Rrh'dan is with you, inside you, encompassing you, enmeshed with who-what you are. You have no edges. You are the depths he swims in. You are the tiny struggling things he swallows whole. He turns toward-through-around you, opens his mouth-heart-self, and—

You have no words for what comes after that.

* * *

When you wake, you are in your own flesh again, weighted down with it, confined by your own senses. The world feels so barren, so impoverished—so much of it is beyond your pitiful human grasp. Loss and longing wrack you, stickiness in the back of your throat.

For a moment, before you woke fully, you _understood_. That moment was so perfect that the memory hurts, and you roll over, away from the sunlight oozing in under the blinds. Your gaze falls on Rrh'dan's gift. You're caught between gratitude and fury: he has given you something so precious and beautiful, and he has given you so _little_ of it.

Your hands shake as you reach out to pour yourself another glass.


End file.
